ADVERTISEMENTWhile millions of people were impacted by a massive power blackout in Spain and Portugal on Monday, only parts of the southwest region of neighbouring France experienced any disruption.
France’s swift disconnection from the Spanish grid spared the country a more severe impact, resulting in only a few minutes of outage.
The question on many minds now is could such a large-scale grid failure happen in France?
According to experts and French government officials, the risk is relatively low but not non-existent.
France’s last major incident was in 1978
France has not experienced a nationwide blackout of such a scale since December 1978, when a high-voltage line in the eastern department of Meurthe-et-Moselle failed, plunging the country into the dark for several hours.
Today, its electrical infrastructure is much more robust, supported by interconnections with neighbouring countries and multiple layers of protection.
On Tuesday morning, France provided an emergency supply of 1,500 megawatts to help stabilise the Spanish grid, explained Jean-Paul Roubin, Head of Customer and Operations Director of RTE, the French power grid operator, in a press release sent to Euronews.
Moreover, hospitals, nuclear power plants and other critical infrastructure are equipped with backup generators capable of operating independently for several days, according to government authorities.
France also has a dedicated rapid-response force known as Fire (Force d’intervention rapide électricité), comprising 2,500 specialists who can be deployed within minutes of such an event.
According to Alicia Bassière, a researcher and member of the PowDev project, which studies the resilience of the French power grid, it’s still too early to give a sure-fire answer about whether France could avoid a similar power outage.
“We still don’t know exactly what caused the blackout in Spain. Without knowing the causes, it’s hard to say whether or not it could happen in France,” Bassière explained in an interview with Euronews.
“Spain remains an isolated system on a peninsula. So both Spain and Portugal, for example, don’t have as much support as France from foreign countries to share electricity to meet their needs.”
The events of Monday highlighted the effectiveness of Europe’s cross-border electricity network, explained Alicia Bassière.
As the Spanish grid faltered, France’s network was automatically disconnected for one hour before being gradually reconnected to supply power to Spain, hence preventing the spread of the outage.
“We can call on interconnections via our neighbours…more easily than in Spain, as we are neighbours with more countries. We have a lot of safety mechanisms to avoid blackouts and we have a lot of energy in reserve that can be injected into the network quickly if needed.”
ADVERTISEMENT“We’ve already seen yesterday that, in the event of a problem, the European network is very good at isolating the problem,” said Bassière.
“So there was no spread of the blackout, just a few power cuts in the Basque Country that lasted an hour or so.”
She adds that France’s heavy reliance on nuclear power provides another safeguard: “We have a more robust nuclear system which can help us to adjust the frequency a little more easily in the event of a major issue.”
There are also pre-arranged emergency agreements with industrial plants, allowing them to spot energy consumption on demand to help balance the grid in the case of a blackout, said the researcher.
ADVERTISEMENTWhat to do if an outage happens?
In the unlikely event of a widespread blackout, authorities advise citizens to be prepared.
“In case this happens, prepare an emergency kit such as medicines, canned food, water, an electric lamp and a battery-powered radio,” suggested Alicia Bassière.
“It’s also important to prepare some cash. And it’s essential not to panic. Crisis management plans are in place, they exist, they work, and they worked yesterday in Spain.”
She also advised against overloading emergency phone lines unnecessarily.
ADVERTISEMENT“It’s unlikely to last more than twelve hours, as we saw in Spain yesterday.”
